Review: The Very Hungry Caterpillar Card Game

It was the lil'un's birthday last week, and one of her presents was the Very Hungry Caterpillar card game. We sat down as a family to play it with her, and well, let's see shall we...

Rules
The cards are You start with 5 cards each, and the idea of the game is to work through the week, by playing the cards with the days of the week marked showing what the caterpillar ate that day in the story. If you don't have the card you need, then you either pick one from the pile, or play the Sunday wildcard, that resets back to Monday. You win by getting rid of all your cards, and having a butterfly card. The stated goal of the game, apart from being 'fun' is to teach kids the days of the week.


Theme
The strength of this game is in it's theme, and how well the card game matches the book. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, like all the great kids books, is a very simple story well told. The cards are all decorated with images from the book with the original Eric Carle artwork that we all know and love, and this is very appealing, as all kids love this book. It even takes me back to reading it as a kid. Very pretty.

Gameplay
The idea is that you play through your hand, learning the days of the week as you go, then win when the only card you have left is a butterfly card, just like in the story. However, this is where this game falls apart. The simplicity of the story works against us here, as the designers have stuck to the script to the detriment of the play-ability of the game. We've played through it 4 times, on two of those games, we couldn't actually play to get a winner, and of one of those, I forced the game to work due to not shuffling the deck after having gone through the pack completely once. So of the 4 games, only once came out at a natural conclusion with a clear winner. The winning of the game is pure luck, with no skill involved.

Sunday is a wild card, when you can't play anything else, you play a Sunday card, and you reset back to Monday. In reality though, all this does is reset the blocked play to another day. It's fine to have more Sunday cards, but if there are just the same number of Monday cards to all the others, you hit a wall with Monday instead. You end up running through all your Sunday resets early in the game, then being completely stuck unable to complete the game. This leads to frustration in the big'un, who gets the rules and wants to play through, and boredom in the lil'un, who, although the game is supposed to be for 3+, just isn't old enough for the rules as written, who then wanders off to do something else.

The other clunky mechanic is the butterfly card. You need one to win, but if you draw more than one, you put the other one back in the pile (it is not stated where). This just seems inelegant to me. I know there want to make it a mechanic to get the butterfly, and there are only 4 in the game, but having to put it back in the pile once you have one seems not to be the best way to make this happen.

Improvements
Overall, a poorly thought out game, with no real draw. The cards are pretty, and could be used for a matching game, but the rules are broken to the point that you'd have to start from scratch rather than house-rule some fixes, although we are going to try with making the Sunday card a Wildcard that can replace any day, but doesn't reset the game to Monday. The box is pretty, and the illustrations are fun, but there are better ways to teach your kids the days of the week. Finally, the game is supposed to be for 3+, but the reading of the days of the days of the week is beyond most 3 year old. Lil'un is now 4, and she lost interest quickly. Don't bother buying this one.

The game on Boardgamegeek.com where it was given 3.59/10. Which I think is a fair score.
Buy it, or don't, on amazon.ca.

Upper Canada Village

As newly minted Canadian Citizens, we get a Canadian cultural pass. This allows free access to a whole host of attractions and parks across the country, as a way of helping new Canadians to see and access the country. One of the places we can get into for free is the Upper Canada Village. This is only about an hour and a half from Montreal.

I can remember going to somethign similar as a kid, with the Canadian branch of the family on one of our many visits to Toronto as a young 'un (I think it may have been this one), but I can't remember a thing about it, other than some pigs, people in costume, and it being really muddy. Fortunately, that was not the experience we had today (the blistering sun for one kept the mud at bay). Furthermore, there were two added bonuses to the visit. First off, they were holding a Medieval Festival today, replete with vikings and jousting (not at the same time) amongst a host of other events. This we knew of before going, and was one of the reasons we went today. The second bonus was that the village is sited right beside Crysler Farm, that of 1813 fame.

Firrstly, some pics from the Medieval part of the day.

...and got to try out some others

We got to see all these warmachines in action...

Big'un gets to go for a ride on the knight's horse.

Full contact jousting.

A dragon and minstrel show.

Vikings marching to battle. I was surprised how easily the lil'un followed the chevaliers!

I was sorely tempted by the one with the wings!

Then it was back to the 1860's era village. A great mix of buildings with many roles within the village. Unlike a lot of this type of place, where you just look in and see old stuff, each one of the buildings had a volunteer playing the role of the owner of the building, and each one had very interesting stuff to pass on, as well as was able to answer any questions we had. The last little surprise, was, when looking at the map of the village, I noted one of the homes was named the Robertson House. Made me feel right at home! If you're in the area, I cannot recommend this place more highly.

In the end, the three things in one place was too much for one visit, and we didn't make it round the farm memorial site, so no pics of that. That plus the gorgeous weather all day left those of us with a soft northern complexion in need of retiring back to the air conditioned car before sun-stroke set in. The good news is that there was enough of the village still to see (and a train we didn't manage to go on), that we plan to come back another time (as it's still free for us for the rest of the year), at which point I intend to get a look at the site.

Paint Table Saturday

I have never yet participated in this spot as yet, as Saturdays are not a day I get to do much painting. However, this afternoon was a family painting session, as the girls and I sat down together.

First off, we did some painting on paper, then, once I waited to see if everyone was actually in the mood to paint, and not to wander off and do other stuff, we each took one of these old WFB Wood Elf archers each and got stuck in.

Man, these things are old. The first plastic minis I bought, and I think some of the first plastics GW made. The detail on these is impressively minimal, but they were perfect for today's exercise.

The big'un was having trouble with the paint coming off the mini when she was holding it (we were using other craft paints as well as my acrylics, but they were doing the job), so I had to get each of them a cork to hold the mini with.

Here are the final results:

As you can see, only the lil'un finished hers off, what a speed painter! I loved the colour the big'un used for the cloak, so I copied her, no need for more green in my archer unit. She in turn liked the green hair her sister had painted and copied that.

I have more of these guys, some of which I painted about 20 years ago or so. Look out for them in the near future.